Talk:John C. Baez

Some initial comments
I could say a lot more, but it'd be hard to stay NPOV. -- Toby 22:24 Mar 8, 2003 (UTC)

Hahahahaha -- Miguel


 * Hi Toby and Miguel, I created Baez's mathematical geneology as an xfig file, then exported it to png file and uploaded it. Unfortunately the text isn't quite a readable as I would like (have an idea to fix that, perhapsn not a very good one).  Let me know if you want me to add you guys to the bottom so you can put your "family tree" on your user pages.


 * Actually, we might be distant "cousins". I simply cannot get my own former advisor to divulge details of his career at St. Petersburg University, but he seems to regard Anatoly M. Vershik at his mentor, and Vershik is a direct "descendent" of Dmitri Egorov, and thus, through Nikolai Bugaev, of Gauss.


 * Here's an idea: someone should use the Mathematics Geneology Project to make one of those enormous posters, one in which the "family relations" (directed graph, not a tree) of Guass's most famous mathematical relatives are shown. In playing around I found many fascinating and even ironical relationships.


 * Another idea: a project to provide a Wiki article (perhaps stubby) for every mathematical biography in the MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive Currently there are many awkward omissions.


 * Yet another idea: some volunteer database expert should create a search tool for Baez's website which actually works (the existing one seems to be entirely broken) .---CH (talk) 16:37, 13 August 2005 (UTC)


 * Never mind; WebGlimpse seems to work very well for me now in searching that site. The underlying glimpse and "agrep" (approximate grep) is a fine full_text/full_site indexing tool.---CH 16:50, 24 December 2005 (UTC)

Alleged email exchange between Jack Sarfatti and Lubos Motl (apparently pasted in anonymously by Jack Sarfatti)
On Dec 26, 2005, at 9:52 AM, Lubos Motl a physcist from Harvard wrote to Jack Sarfatti: 'Again to be precise, I have no objection to Baez & Witten getting money from a math budget. I think their math work is good, but they should not call it theoretical physics.' written by Jack Sarfatti

"Dear Jack,

your comparison of Baez to Witten shows that you are quite decoupled. If you want to have some idea how people's work is generally appreciated, see pages like

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22edward+witten%22 http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22lubos+motl%22 http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22john+baez%22 http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22jack+sarfatti%22

Incidentally, almost all Baez's citations are for papers on black hole entropy in LQG that are today known to be bullshit, partially because of some of my papers.

Best LM" ______________________________________________________________________________ E-mail: lumo@matfyz.cz   fax: +1-617/496-0110   Web: http://lumo.matfyz.cz/   eFax: +1-801/454-1858  work: +1-617/384-9488  home: +1-617/868-4487 (call)   Webs: http://schwinger.harvard.edu/~motl/     http://motls.blogspot.com/

—Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.124.78.74 (talk • contribs) (apparently Jack Sarfatti in real life) 21:34, 9 January 2006


 * Users should be aware that Jack Sarfatti has been permabanned since December 14, 2005, and therefore should not be editing the WP at all. See Account suspensions.  Future violations can be reported; see Requests for CheckUser and .  In any case, pasting personal email into a talk page would be inappropriate.  See also
 * biographies of living persons,
 * verifiable facts only, please,
 * Wikipedia is not a soapbox for pursuing personal vendettas, expressing grudges, etc.
 * CH 21:46, 31 March 2006 (UTC)


 * BTW, Sarfatti's style of talk page spam is uniquely confusing (in my experience), but he appears to be claiming above that he wrote to Motl "Again to be precise, I have no objection to Baez & Witten getting money from a math budget. I think their math work is good, but they should not call it theoretical physics", and that Motl then replied with the alleged email. To point out the obvious, this alleged email exchange should be regarded as unverified and probably unverifiable. ---CH 23:08, 31 March 2006 (UTC)


 * It is not just talk page spamming where he employs this confusing mode of discourse. Recall the other fiasco that resulted when Sarfatti quoted Baez, and sent his garbled ramblings on to Motl at sci.physics.strings.  What a mess! -lethe talk [ +] 23:42, 31 March 2006 (UTC)


 * I know, I know. I don't read sci.physics.strings, so I missed that particular episode, but I am yet another Wikipedian whose user page has been vandalized by sarfattispam, good grief.  (At a time when I was foolishly trying to tutor him in elementary wikiskills, like signing talk page comments; it seems that no good deed goes unpunished when you are trying to reason with a crank!)


 * Crankery seems to typically involve an extensive suite of incompetencies of which the crank is generally unaware. It seems to outrage cranks when bemused observers point out this phenomenon.---CH 18:52, 1 April 2006 (UTC)


 * He called me on my user page, among other things, a nazi, a member of the "academic old left", an islamofascist, and an antisemite, and all because he thought I wrote something in his article which I had nothing to do with. Clearly he's struggling with the complicated system of multiple editors here.  And he's furious that I use an internet handle and don't reveal my real name here, but of course he provides the perfect motivation to do so.  It was all quite amusing.  Then I banned 3 or 4 of his IPs.  -lethe talk [ +] 19:07, 1 April 2006 (UTC)


 * Just read what he wrote on your user page, and all I can say is...wow.---CH 18:33, 2 April 2006 (UTC)

Various style and NPOV issues
Hi, Zargulon, I don't understand the basis for your objection. I have partially reverted your change, slightly modifying my previous version and correcting something you munged.

Is your objection that I wrote that Baez is well known rather than well known in the field or something like that? Baez is well-known as a researcher in the field, and this is verifiable by checking citations of his papers. He is also well known as an InterNet personality, which is verifiable by Googling for links to his website, replies to his posts, and so forth. However, I changed well known to well known in the field, which may mollify you.

Please note that you misunderstood Doktorvater, so your version didn't quite make sense. I have fixed that in the current version.

If you are still unhappy with the current version, please discuss here what changes you would like to make. ---CH 21:23, 31 March 2006 (UTC)


 * You are right, I did misunderstand doktorvater. I am working on complying with your request. Zargulon 21:26, 31 March 2006 (UTC)


 * Problems I identified (and fixed)
 * Inappropriately florid language: "denizens","bravura","Prince of Mathematicians"
 * Unsourcable or POV-presented-as-NPOV:"unpredictable but often fascinating","superb","polymath"
 * Weasel language:"often regarded as the inspiration for..."
 * Superfluous:"oversized"
 * I also think doktorvater requires explanation so I have tried, maybe you can do better. (It should also be lower case since it is functioning as a common noun within English. The fact that it would be capitalized in German is irrelevant).
 * Other problems still to be fixed:
 * Only a minority of usenet users know about TWFIMC, so current version is weasel
 * Baez's crackpot index's notability is in my opinion overstated too. Zargulon 21:44, 31 March 2006 (UTC)

Zargulon, in my version I was trying for a hint of humor and style. I still don't understand why you seem to feel that "denizens", "bravura", "unpredictable but often fascinating", "superb", "polymath" are inappropriate, and I was hoping you would explain that at greater length on this talk page. FYI, Prince of Mathematicians is a term often applied to Carl Friedrich Gauss in semi-humorous fashion (gently mocking hagiography such as can be found in the well known book by the late Eric Temple Bell).

I'll let your revision stand, since I think it is acceptable, just less stylish. Actually, this raises an issue: one of the problems with WP is that style and humor tend to be suppressed because someone doesn't get a joke. Maybe that's not a problem, but I take the view that WP is primarily here to serve readers, and removing any semblance of style could degrade their reading experience. Just something to think about.---CH 22:02, 31 March 2006 (UTC)

Ooops, Zargulon, your version still has some factual inaccuracies. TWF (this week's finds) has never been a regular column. Rather, it is an irregular sequence of postings by Baez, with often lively followup comments by others. (Disclaimer: I have myself participated in some of these discussions.) In recent years, the postings have been less frequent than in the earlier years. ---CH 22:07, 31 March 2006 (UTC)


 * CH, I admire your magnanimity and your sense of humour, important qualities for a Wikipedian, and qualities I will certainly try to emulate in the future. I take the point about "regular". Zargulon 22:10, 31 March 2006 (UTC)

Thanks! OK, I rearranged some stuff regarding the (humorous but factually accurate) mathematical family net and partial explanation of some of the in-jokes. Let's let others take a look and comment on the (in)-appropriateness of obscure humor in the WP. ---CH 22:27, 31 March 2006 (UTC)

It's all a conspiracy!
John Baez traces his mathematical ancestry back through Karl Weierstrass, one of whose students was Sofia Kovalevskaya, who is rumored to be the subject of the next novel by Thomas Pynchon. Elsewhere on Baez's geneaology network is Nikolai Bugaev, father of the novelist Andrei Bely, whose novel Petersburg was called one of the twentieth century's four greatest prose masterpieces, by no less an authority than Vladimir Nabokov. Got that?

Now, John Baez's cousin is Joan Baez, the famous folk singer (and daughter of physicist Albert Baez). Joan's younger sister Mimi married the writer Richard Fariña, who studied first engineering and then English at Cornell University, where Vladimir Nabokov taught literature. And who was Fariña's friend and one of Nabokov's most talented students? Why, Thomas Pynchon.

It goes without saying that conspiracy and paranoia are prevalent themes in Pynchon's fiction.

Anville 10:26, 1 April 2006 (UTC)


 * Not just Pynchon, but Bely and Nabokov. If you read Bely's autobiographical novel Kotik Letaev and Nabokov's novel Ada, you'll find more connections with Baez's math/physics interests.  And then there is Sofia's connection with Dostoevsky and just possibly with the somewhat mysterious Hermann Schubert, inventor of Schubert calculus, yet another beautiful subject which has come up in TWF.  However, I believe it has never been verified that Pynchon enrolled in (or sat in on) any classes given by Nabokov.  (If Fariña or Pynchon say he was, I'll accept that.)  BTW, it was I who pointed out the facts you mentioned when I (re)wrote the WP biographies of Bely and his difficult dad.


 * Riddle: what is the English equivalent of Andrei Bely? "Andrew White", of course.  Now: who was the first president of Cornell University?  And what Russian novelist did he know?  What career did that man briefly pursue before turning to writing?  What happened to the hero of that writer's first novel near the end?  And what subject does Baez sometimes teach? ---CH 19:37, 1 April 2006 (UTC)


 * Well, Nabokov himself never remembered Pynchon, but he didn't seem to interact with students on a person-by-person basis. In a footnote in Strong Opinions, it is stated that his wife Vera recalled grading Pynchon's papers, but only becuase of his peculiar handwriting.  Jules Siegel's tell-all piece in Playboy claims that Pynchon attended Nabokov's lectures but had a hard time understanding Nabokov's accent.  (I've heard Nabokov recordings, and I find that one a little hard to believe.)  The closest thing to solid evidence I know of is in J. Kerry Grant's Companion to The Crying of Lot 49, which states that Pynchon probably only audited Nabokov's class (the reference in Grant's bibliography is C. Hollander, "Pynchon's Politics: The Presence of an Absence", Pynchon Notes 26–27 (Spring–Fall 1990): 5–59).


 * I need to sit down with Ada again, in my copious free time. I recall some awfully rewarding stuff in there from my last reading, but it didn't quite capture my heart like Lolita and Pale Fire.  (Maybe Ada is the book where one must lean on Brian Boyd to make sense of it all.)  Hey, I know&mdash;let's make a category-theoretic reading of Pale Fire!  There's gotta be a way. . ..


 * As for your other questions, well, it's amazing what hypertext can deliver these days.  Let's see, in a dusty volume exhumed from a university library's stacks years ago, I read that Tolstoy's historiography in War and Peace was a prefiguration of Isaac Asimov's psychohistory, and in Slow Learner, Pynchon sez that he relied upon Asimov to explain what entropy is all about.  Asimov hung out with Kurt Vonnegut, another Cornell alum, whose novel Cat's Cradle suggests that the tangled lives perceived by paranoids are teams organized by God to get things done.  Vonnegut got the idea for the central gimmick "ice-nine" from Irving Langmuir, who first offered the idea of an apocalyptic allotrope to H. G. Wells (who never used it).  Naturally, Nabokov also praised Wells, particularly his "romances" The War of the Worlds and The Time Machine.  (I should really get some sleep now.)


 * "A paranoid is simply someone in possession of all the facts," as Spider Jerusalem so wisely puts it. Anville 22:38, 1 April 2006 (UTC)


 * And what was allegedly the title of Foundation (novel) in the translation published in Egypt? (Clearly we can keep this up until we get bored or other users tell us to shut up.)  I like the idea of category-theoretic reading of Pale Fire :-/  ---CH 00:38, 2 April 2006 (UTC)


 * If Michael Joyce can use "diffeomorphism" where the rest of us would say "repetition" or "foreshadowing", I think any (mis)application of mathematics to literary theory is legitimate. Anville 18:24, 15 April 2006 (UTC)

Quirks of English language
FYI, 4.89.246.112 (Verizon, apparently in Arp, near Overton, TX), ironical and ironic are both valid adjectival forms, but I think the former sounds more, well, ironical :-/

You can Google for Kdict or wordnet, two useful utilities which query the Princeton Word Net server. Sample output:

senses of ironical

Sense 1 ironic, ironical => incongruous (vs. congruous)

Sense 2 dry, ironic, ironical, wry => humorous (vs. humorless), humourous

Fun, neh? ---CH 19:11, 13 April 2006 (UTC)


 * I did the research. Ironical is technically a word, but gets slaughtered by the Google Test:
 * Ironical - 1,320,000 hits
 * Ironic - 39,800,000 hits
 * That's a 30:1 ratio for "ironic" over "ironical", which vanished from mainstream dictionaries nearly a hundred years ago and doesn't even have a Wiktionary entry. "Ironic" also wins the Wikipedia Test, 64000 to 222, or about 290:1.


 * More of my targets for elimination -- "irregardless", "ergonomical", "axiomatical", "humoristic" (when used as an adjective form of "humorous", but okay when used as an adjective form of "humorist"), "humoristical" (ughhh), "ballistical", "narcissistical", "altruistical", "atavistical", "misogynistical", and many more! All of these can be found in not-quite-common usage (even "humoristical") and all of them are technically acceptable to use, but there's no harm in trying to standardize to the overwhelmingly more popular spellings. If any of the article's regulars like it better the weird way, they can revert, as you did, and I won't touch it again.


 * It is a battle that must be waged, lest the madness spiral out of control, turning narcissists into narcissisticalists, vandals into vandalists, and deletionists into deletionalismiserists. 4.89.246.174 21:45, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

Arp, did you see the brief discussion above of the possiblity that this kind of "battle", if conducted without due sensitivity to context, may tend to remove any semblance of humor and style from WP? I put it to you that this might be a Bad Thing. An encylopedia must above all be clear, factually reliable, and comprehensive, but to be of maximal service to the reader, it seems to me, articles should if possible be not merely readable but enjoyable. In your zeal to purify the language, you may still be missing the point of why I deliberately chose to write "ironical" rather than "ironic". Assuming, of course, that you are not simply teasing...---CH 22:45, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

Students beware
I contributed to an 2006 version of this article and had been monitoring it for bad edits, but I am leaving the WP and am now abandoning this article to its fate.

Just wanted to provide notice that I am only responsible (in part) for the last version I edited; see User:Hillman/Archive. I emphatically do not vouch for anything you might see in more recent versions. I would not regard Baez as controversial figure (although his research has involved a minority approach to quantum gravitation which some proponents of string theory regard--- rather absurdly, in my view--- as a dangerous heresy), but he seems to personally disliked by cranks such as permabanned, who has apparently edited this article as an anon. Given this, I have reason to believe that at least some future versions of this article are likely to be vandalized, or to contain slanted information, misinformation, or disinformation.

Good luck to all students in your search for information, regardless!---CH 01:00, 1 July 2006 (UTC)

Trivia section
Most of the previous version of this article was devoted to Baez' mathematical genealogy: this is actually a rather trivial detail in his overall biography; I have relegated it to a trivia section, and converted the huge mathematical genealogy chart, which took up most of the article's space, to a thumbnail image. -- The Anome 08:39, 7 October 2006 (UTC)

I think that you're basically right to do that, but that it's unnecessary to have a specific Trivia section. The items there stand as fine paragraphs on their own. &mdash;Toby Bartels 21:14, 10 July 2007 (UTC)

Biography assessment rating comment
The article may be improved by following the WikiProject Biography 11 easy steps to producing at least a B article. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me here. -- Jreferee 19:41, 12 March 2007 (UTC)

WikiProject class rating
This article was automatically assessed because at least one WikiProject had rated the article as stub, and the rating on other projects was brought up to Stub class. BetacommandBot 09:56, 10 November 2007 (UTC)

John Baez added some information
I added an infobox and photo to this article, and a bit more information. Since I guess it's considered naughty to add information to ones own biography --- and I can understand why it would be --- maybe someone can check it out and eliminate anything problematic. John Baez (talk) 00:35, 17 August 2009 (UTC)


 * It's naughty to add claims to fame, but there shouldn't be any problem with mundane biographic details. —Tamfang (talk) 02:36, 17 August 2009 (UTC)
 * I have heard that some celeb tried to correct her place of birth and was reverted for lack of a Reliable Source, until she put the datum on her own blog. —Tamfang (talk) 01:30, 7 April 2011 (UTC)


 * Okay, good. Now it says "clarification needed" next to the statement that I got a "bachelor's degree" in mathematics at Princeton.  Is there something confusing about the idea of a bachelor's degree?  If more precision is needed: I got a B.A. (bachelor of arts) in math at Princeton.  (It may be surprising, but at Princeton math majors get a bachelor of arts instead of a bachelor of sciences.)    John Baez (talk) 03:46, 27 August 2009 (UTC)

It's All True
I see that "This biographical article needs additional citations for verification". Presumably that's because of the claim (not put here by me!) that "This Week's Finds anticipated the concept of a personal weblog". If someone wants a source for that, try

http://www.scientificblogging.com/adaptive_complexity/blog/john_baez_math_blogging

or

http://www.danamackenzie.com/moon/?tag=john-baez

or

http://www.ams.org/notices/201003/rtx100300333p.pdf

The last is written by me, so maybe it doesn't count.

John Baez (talk) 21:56, 29 March 2010 (UTC)
 * Wikipedia is not at its best trying to referee claims like 'the X was the first ever Y on the internet'. We prefer that some respectable outside publication has checked out the early blogs and said who was there first. The title 'first physics blogger' is probably true and if the New York Times said it, we could include it. There is no problem for us to link to a very early post that looks bloggish and is by you. Incidentally, your Wikipedia article seems rather minimal considering all the interesting work you've done, and perhaps you could draft up some new material here on the Talk page, that we might consider including!  EdJohnston (talk) 23:05, 29 March 2010 (UTC)

Update needed
Dr Baez has been in Singapore lately, and thus probably not teaching at UCR ... —Tamfang (talk) 20:02, 9 December 2012 (UTC)

No, he is teaching at UCR. See here: http://mathdept.ucr.edu/faculty/baez.html — Preceding unsigned comment added by 91.48.117.239 (talk) 22:16, 23 December 2012 (UTC)